Eason Tsang Ka Wai

Commissioned by M+ Hong Kong.
Eason Tsang Ka Wai has been regularly visiting the M+ construction site since 2015 to produce artistic documentations of the M+ building construction.

t o u c h (2019) records the artist’s repetitive process of dropping a white glove onto a glass screen. Only the split moment the glove touches the screen remains visible, its slapping arrhythmia a startling signal unpredictable to the most vigilant of viewers. Impossibly, the ultra-thin (infra-mince à Duchamp) screen becomes the closest distance between the virtual space behind the video display and the real world where audience locates.

The artist investigates the internal structure revealed behind the deceptively thin image of consumerism and psychological persuasion. By exposing the inner workings of the ubiquitous device in our modern society, Tsang reverses the power structure that produced them for spectacle and visual pleasure, and questions the semiotic foundation of referential relations.

Unordinary images captured from the artist’s daily life are printed on individual slides and made into light boxes. With the abnormal flashing and halos of lights, the works pinpoint a breakdown of order that is illuminated.

A 6 minute 55 second long shot video projection on a semi-transparent curtain, this work captures the movement of fleeting clouds that subtly negates the coordinates for the viewers, and traces the ambiguity that underlies one’s relationship with spatiality and temporality.

The video features a series of zoomed TV channel numbers at the top right corner of the screen. The channels have been set by the artist to switch once every second for a continuation of 30 seconds. In encapsulating the oppressive passage of time through the night, this work highlights the fragmented state of existence of the individual against the tremendous social mechanisms at work.

Housework is a series of works that questions the viewing of public spaces. The artist stages ironic interventions that negate the purposes of these mundane acts of cleaning, resulting in the realisation of a certain powerlessness in our systems. These interventions include physical material barriers or visual impairment.

Tsang transformed printed patterns on everyday objects into installations with real flowers, before restoring the patterns from installations to the graphic form through photography. The work is an exploration into the “re-manifesting” nature of photography.

Through the process of looking at the skyscrapers in different cities from an upshot angle, the artist studied the vertically extending planes of architectures closely, and discovered new “landmarks” of these buildings.

In this densely populated city, buildings move vertically up toward the sky. On these vertically extending planes, the artist found the hidden new landmarks of the city.

Rooftop is a public yet private space. Artist sneaked into the rooftop of a skyscraper and captured the bird eye views of the architectural structure and human activities on the rooftops of the surrounding buildings.